


Dust to Dust

by Vehuel



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Developing Friendships, Gen, Just Good Old Friendship, No Romance Between the Female Protagonist and the Transformer, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Present Tense, Short Chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-06-21 16:17:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15561630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehuel/pseuds/Vehuel
Summary: -He pulls old-world traditions and standings around him like a mantel, living and projecting his past in a way that somehow, he hopes, hides his fears of a future he no longer sees as certain.-She’s always ready to run. There’s a duffel bag packed with essentials under her bed, a thick wad of cash under a floorboard, and a fully stocked first-aid kit that would make most doctors stare at her in shock. She’s always scared, and ready to run. From something, anything, herself and the inevitable that waits patiently at the end of the road.(WARNINGS INSIDE)[Currently on HIATUS]





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now, read the warnings extremely well before reading anything of this.  
> This story is more practice than anything else, and as such, might never be finished, and might have large periods of time between updates.  
> Now, for the important things:  
> WARNINGS:  
> \- depression  
> \- suicidal thoughts  
> \- dissociation  
> \- everything concerning mental illness  
> \- self-harm
> 
> If you can handle it, go ahead.  
> If you think any of this might trigger you, please, PLEASE, consider carefully.  
> I'm dealing with most of this myself and sometimes reading about it makes me sick.  
> If you have questions about the warnings, please write a comment. 
> 
> Also the chapters will be varying in length, but short overall (some extremely short). I close chapters as I see fit, not considering the number of pages, so you've been warned.

 

 

1.

 

She’s running, and there’s no escape.

She runs and runs and runs and the blood _burns_ in her veins, the sound of her heartbeat the only thing that she catches in the thick fog she finds herself in, a deep thrumming sound that echoes around and inside her, so fast and bone-deep that in the end it just feels like a deep _hum_ , resonating and pulsing and _vibrating_ like energy.

She runs, and goes nowhere. She runs, and she’s still there, trapped and bound with the walls closing in, but there are no walls, just endless silence and space around her.

She runs on solid ground that looks like nothing, feels like nothing, until all she can feel is just the heaviness of her breath, the sound of her heartbeat, and the _silence_.

She runs but there’s no escape, she knows what awaits her at the end of the circle, when life runs its course and she will have to _die_ and there’s nothing to be done about it, she can’t escape this, the inevitability of time, the _fear_ it gives her making it hard to breathe, so hard, so she just runs and runs and runs and doesn’t fear looking back because the real _danger_ is laying ahead an-

She wakes up.

She wakes up, and it’s dark around her and out of the window she left open with the futile hope an elusive breeze would move around the too-hot summer air encompassing her apartment.

She wakes up, and she’s tangled in the single sheet she _has_ to sleep with no matter the heat she finds herself in, covered in sweat and with her eyes pulsing painfully in their sockets, her blood pressure through the roof.

She wakes up, alone as always, in a dark and almost empty apartment in the outskirts of town, and she still can’t breathe right. There’s an iron bar around her lungs, constricting her chest, not letting it expand as much as it clearly wants too, and the panic of the dream and the sheer _fear_ she always lives in is lurking at the edges of her mind, feeling too wild, too much like madness could feel like, and she knows, despite the illogicality of the thought, she knows that if she stays there, laying down in the darkness and the materiality of her bed, it will wrap itself around her brain and drown her.

She has to move.

She has to run.

So she heaves her shaking body in a sitting position, peeling the thoroughly drenched sheet from her slick skin, and staggers upright on trembling legs. She has only her slips on, but it takes no time at all to hunt down her flimsy black tracksuit and slip it on, and a thin tank top with threadbare straps and holes in random places. Socks and her prized running shoes go on afterwards, and she barely remembers to grab her keys and lock the door behind her before she’s going, trotting down the stairs and already slipping her heaving breathing in a more controlled rhythm, feeling her heartbeat falter at the change and try to keep up, struggling for a few, breath-staggering seconds.

Four floors down and her heart has settled, and she’s closing the battered front door when her eyes stop trying to hammer their ways out of her skull, her blood pressure easing in a more regular, but still elevated flow.

Outside is dark and silent, the filthy street barely illuminated by two distant lampposts, the shadows of the alleys extending like fat slithering tentacles across the pavement. It’s night, and no one is out, but distantly she can hear few bursts of laughter, the chiming of cutlery and dishes crashing together from nearby restaurants, probably closing for the night and tidying up for the next day.

The emptiness and silence around her feel comforting this time, pressing on her skin with an almost tangible touch that feels like silk and heavy like a blanket.

The night air tastes like relief when she breathes from her mouth, and the madness prickling and scraping the edges of her mind seems to retreat, slinking down her neck and disappearing as if knowing it wouldn’t have her, this time.

She runs.

It feels like the only thing she’s capable of doing, the thing she’s _born_ for.

When she runs, she’s free, she’s not tied down by obligations and material things like work, home, clutter and social duties and expectations.

She’s not female, when she runs. She’s a spirit, a ghost in the dark, she’s not human anymore. Her body is not ruled by clockwork physiology, her cells are not dying and time is not slipping like sand from her fingers.

She’s ancient, a force old like the world, breath and blood and lungs no longer matter because there’s just _movement_ , going forward, _escape_.

She runs at night because the shadows feel like belonging, nobody sees her, nobody judges and tells her their opinions and tries to force her in a shape she doesn’t want to conform in, a shape she feels is too narrow for her.

The dark of the night feels like a blanket, and even when lampposts end, along with the road, and night really encompasses her, she keeps on running. Her feet beat the ground she no longer sees, pavement giving away to dry earth, suburb relenting to open countryside, and despite the risk of falling, the uneven terrain under her, she keeps on going forward.

She’s dying.

She’s always dying, she’s _born_ to die, her body rolling forward without stopping towards the end, and nothing will stop that.

There’s no escape. Nothing she can do. But the knowledge haunts her.

Out there, in the dark, alone, it can’t hurt her. She’s running, and she’s free.

Sweat coats her skin, drips from her nose, and despite not being able to see it she knows her sloppily cropped hair has turned three shades darker, wet and plastered to her skull.

The air is still. July in Rome is always a tragedy, the too-hot air pressing against her body, humidity too high, and despite this she knows that she’s kind of lucky too. She lives in the outskirts, in the suburbs, where buildings get progressively more apart and the countryside is a deeply-loved neighbor. Downtown has it worse, up to five degrees warmer, and despite parks and trees scattered around, it’s too densely populated for her tastes.

She slows, gradually, her full-on run changing into a jog, the ache in her calves settling in and screaming for attention. She ignores it.

Before her the light pollution has disappeared, the sky clearing and darkening, stars becoming more visible. They blink, tremulous and burning, and she wishes she had taken the time to learn constellations when she was younger. When she was still curious about the things of this world. When her mind had not been poisoned by the fumes of society, by the _truth_ of existence, by the futility of her own life.

Learning nowadays is more something done through manual work, not intellectual interest.

Sometimes she grieves for the loss of her innocence.

Finally she stops, staring around her but not seeing anything, only vague shapes. But that’s alright. After a moment decision she leaves the track she has been barely able to follow until now, and ventures in the open fields, grass brushing against her pants and somehow managing to tickle and sting her ankles through the material. Morning dew has already coated the strands and will be gone as soon as the sun comes up, in a few hours’ time.

Crickets are singing, making a racket, but it just seems to deepen the silence, to settle it around her. She’s calm. She’s not afraid. Her dream doesn’t linger in the corners of her mind anymore. She’ll have forgotten it by sunrise.

And in the peace she’s feeling, _of course_ something interrupts her.

A boom rumbles and shakes the earth, thrumming against her bones, and _something_ streaks across the sky. It comes closer, and closer, and closer, it flies over her with heat briefly burning her skin and crash-lands three fields over in a shower of detritus and dirt.

The shockwave feels like a wall in her face, and she goes flying, tumbling roughly through grass and shrubs, cutting her skin and tearing her already worn out clothes. She ends her journey on her back, the breath slammed out of her lungs, her fading vision settling on the stars, until all she can see is fog and light.

Under her the earth rumbles in an earthquake, and unconsciousness grips her and drags her down, feeling like she’s freefalling.

 

 

 

 

She opens her eyes and the sky has lightened considerably, sunrise nearing quickly. There’s a crick in her neck and her muscles feel sore, limbs burning and screaming from all the cuts and minor injuries she acquired in her short trip through air.

The earth has stopped shaking, and there’s a faint burning scent coming from far away.

Despite her body’s protests and the instinct to just settle down and faint some more, she gets to her feet. Nothing seems broken at first feeling, and she’s deeply grateful. Hospitals give her the creeps.

She’s still alone, and she starts walking toward the place she thinks the _thing_ landed on. The more she approaches, the more the stench increases, making her crinkles her nose and sneeze. The grass starts to look charred, and up ahead it is outright burned to the ground, the black terrain crunching under her shoes. A whole field turned to ash.

The crater is big, vaguely the size squared of her five-stories building, with heaped dirt along the borders.

Hours must have passed since the _thing_ landed, because it’s not smoking anymore – she briefly imagines how it must have looked fresh from arrival, scorching hot from entering the atmosphere, probably so wrapped in smoke and fog to be invisible. Now it’s out in the open, dully reflecting the faint rays of sun that had started to peep out over the close mountain range.

The thing is made of gray-colored metal, finely crafted plates seamlessly fitted together to form a vaguely egg-shaped form, lying with the front in the ground.

She doesn’t dare come closer than the barrier formed by the dirt heaps, choosing to sit down on one of them and observe from the distance.

It had stopped smoking, but she doesn’t doubt for a second that touching it would dangerously sear her flesh.

The sky clears more every second, chasing away the shadows. The sun will feel scorching hot in less than two hours, she knows, so she tries to bask in the faint freshness of the air while it lasts.

The thing is not a meteorite, she thinks she’s able to determine. It’s not made of rock – it almost seems puerile as a justification for her exclusion of ‘meteorite’ as the thing’s classification, but everything she might have known about science outside everyday uses had slipped from her mind like water ages ago. This is the reason she’s only 70% sure the thing is not a common meteorite. She wouldn’t know otherwise.

She doesn’t know what kind of metal it is made of – she doesn’t know what kind of alloys would be able to endure the heat of zipping through the atmosphere.

With a faint shock, a distant kind of emotion, she realizes she’s curious.

Everything about the thing is unknown, maybe literally ‘out of this world’, and old inquisitiveness crawls out of the dark caves in her minds it hid so long before.

But she’s not a scientist. She can’t do anything. Therefore, she just sits there on a pile of dirt and observes, tracing with her eyes every sweeping curve of the metal, the way it seems to glow on its own, the faint scorch marks she can see on its belly.

She has only a few hours until she has to go back to her life, to duties and work and forced socialization.

The thing is almost silent, a faint humming vibrating in the air, and in the morning light she catches herself considering it beautiful.

 

 

 

 

She has to go. She has to go but doesn’t want to.

The thing has not moved once since she sat on the pile of dirt, the humming remains constant, and nothing changed.

Time is short. She already stretched her break half an hour more than she had initially considered, and she will have to run fast to catch up and get home on time.

She gets up, looks at the thing, and turns. Hopping down the pile of dirt takes nothing at all despite it being almost half of her height. She starts walking, already anticipating the run, but after a couple of steps she stops.

She turns around.

She can see the upper part of the thing, and it has not changed. Her departure changed nothing.

She takes another couple of steps, her gazes drifting through the scorched grass, and stops again.

Turns around again. The thing is a little smaller, not by much, still faintly shiny and pretty.

Her fingertips are tingling. She lightly swings her fingers, stretches them, but the tingling doesn’t stop.

She has to touch the thing. She _has_ to. She knows that when she goes away she will never see it again, she feels it in her bones. She will take her nightly run the next early morning and all that would remain would be a crater and a scorched field.

She’ll never know what it is. The thing will be just a memory, and she suddenly can’t bear the thought of moving away from something so strangely and unusually beautiful without feeling the texture of that weird metal on her skin.

She walks back to it, her mind telling her how bad of an idea it is, how she will hurt herself, how she doesn’t know if the thing carries some kind of pathogen or poison or whatever that could kill her.

She doesn’t care.

She could die every day just from crossing the street, and her body is actually programmed to shut down in the next eighty years.

Danger is everywhere, and she never wanted something more. Something that she can obtain, that is.

Crawling up the familiar pile of dirt takes slightly longer than hopping down it, and she’s sure more streaks of dirt cover her face and hair. Getting down on the other side takes even more time, cautiousness and a steeper dirt wall making her take her time least she injuries herself. She’s already late anyway.

The bottom of the crater is warm, but not as much as she had feared.

The thing is still there, humming, glowing, being pretty. It’s probably strange to look at something like it and think of it as _pretty_ , but she’s strange on a common day anyway, so she doesn’t care.

It’s in front of her, large and smooth, and strangely the metal doesn’t reflect her image.

She looks some more, the tingling in her fingertips increasing, and with a deep breath rises her arm.

She’s trembling, and her shaky fingers hover a few millimeters from the thing’s surface. Another breath, and she settles her skin on it.

Two seconds.

The time in which she realizes the metal is warm and smooth.

Two seconds.

And the humming stops.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same warnings as the first chapter apply.

2.

 

 

Her brain tries to tell her that she knows how this kind of things go. She touches the strange thing from outer space and her biology is rewritten, she acquires powers, she saves the world. Blah blah. With great power comes great responsibility.

She’s always scoffed at this ideology. Everyone has the power and opportunity to do good, and almost no one does it anyway. Humans are selfish, and mysteriously-acquired powers don’t change the situation.

She wouldn’t be able to be a hero anyway. Just only thinking about the word makes her hackles rise. It’s just society’s definition, common ideology. It doesn’t mean anything if broken down to its essential parts.

She touches the thing, and nothing happens for two seconds.

Two seconds longer than life in which she marvels at the smoothness of the metal, the warmth of it, the glow that seemed so subtle from a distance and now, compared to her dull skin, seems so shiny.

Two seconds, her heart beats, and the humming stops. It had become background, white noise, so constant and regular that she had already incorporated it in her bones and as part of her being. It stops, and the difference is jarring, so upsetting, that she flinches backwards. The silence is painful, she feels the loss of that hum keenly and her face twists in uncertainty.

Peace is broken.

A buzz, and blue light passes over her from head to toe, doing also a sweep of the area around the thing before winking out, as suddenly and out of nowhere as it had come. The light’s vibration, she felt it in her teeth, and she feels like every secret of her body has been stolen, analyzed, categorized. She’s blood and cells and atoms, and she’s been found uninteresting.

She’s also the only thing in the area, so what happens next doesn’t surprise her in the slightest.

The thing moves. One moment an egg, the next plates shift and bend and rotate with a metallic sound she has never heard before, ringing and melodic and hypnotic and she’s frozen. She’s frozen while the thing _straightens_ , from being curled on itself – she doesn’t know if it is because she’s a woman or just a human being that the first thing that comes to mind is a fetus, a newborn, new life ready to explore, new experiences and a major change, curled inside a womb, warm and safe until it’s time to come out of its shell and taste the air – and rises larger than life over her, towering on her diminutive form. No time passes at all between unfurling – the shell is gone, the shell is the being and she marvels at the creature, the ability to use the inside of one’s own body as protection so weird and _glorious_ that her mind stalls, awed – and acting, the thing that is no longer an unanimated object reacting without apparent delay and unsheathing two massive _swords_ from nowhere, the blades clean and so shiny and pointed at her.

The tips are seven inches from her throat, and despite the length between tip and hilt the swords are not trembling, not moving, nothing.

It speaks of strength, of untold pose, of training and full mastery of the art.

She looks up, up those deadly blades, and she’s not afraid. Time is frozen, her mind with it, and she’s not afraid. Her soul is free from the shackles her existence had chained her to, and she looks up, toward her savior, her new sun.

The thing opens its eyes.

Two spots of blue _blue_ light stare at her, fixed, look at her and she knows it knows the contents of her lungs and the count of her red blood cells and the insignificance of her life.

She ought to raise her hands, hints distantly her mind. She doesn’t pretend to know or even wonder about the being origin and knowledge, almost laughs at the thought of them considering her a threat, and she feels that the sudden move, the swords, the stance they’ve settled in with fluid movements, is just a reflex. She’s no way to harm them, nor the wish to do it, and maybe she should just assume the universal pose of ‘surrender’ to ease their mind.

She doesn’t.

She stays there, frozen, deadly sharp metal hovering inches from her throat, and stares.

The lights stare back, so blue, taking her in for a few more seconds before raising and flitting around, taking stock of the crater, dirt everywhere, charred field and green all around. In the distance, buildings and smog and the sun overhead beating down.

They – male? Female? Do aliens have genders, sexuality, social expectations? ‘they’ is the most neutral thing she can think of, and ‘thing’ doesn’t even cross her mind anymore because they’re alive, different than her, but alive and she will never disrespect something with a mind and intelligence not even in her head – are made of metal, with a form vaguely human. Clearly visible are two leg, two arms, a torso and a head, and she can’t help but think of exposure and nakedness seeing the pearlescent alloy, deep gray and from the distance seemingly soft, thickening towards the center, with wires running around and through it.

In the upper part of the torso there’s a circular piece of metal, thicker than the rest, with a different color – different material, her mind whispers – and opaque, and feels important. Also private, and her eyes change their target, settling on the being’s face.

Blue lights and a finely crafted nose above a thin mouth, on a slender visage with two sections running down it on each side, with little slits she can’t help comparing to vents.

The being seems to have completed the inspection of the area around them, and returns their attention to her, eyes intense. The stance relaxes, swords are lowered, then they _disappear_ with a _snick!_ into nowhere.

She’s still not able to make a sound but knows that her first assessment was correct.

The being from outer space is beautiful.

 

 

 

She doesn’t talk. She’s not sure if the being is able to speak, or if she does they will understand her. Therefore, she doesn’t, she just sits back on her pile of dirt – how strange to think of something as her own only because she sat on it for hours – and watches the creature as they look around them more closely than before, less to make sure no one threatening is in the vicinity and more to satisfy one’s curiosity, to learn about the strange place they had landed in.

She wonders about their world. All she has known about the universe is distant stars and the nothingness of space and her own little planet, center of it all not because of some kind of imaginary importance in the grand scheme of things but just because she’s in it, and despite trying to be objective of course she sees most of things from her point of view. She’s not sure she ever considered her whole planet home, not with everyone else on it. There’re people out there very different from her, maybe not bad – because ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are social constructs and personal ethics are different from society’s own – but with different priorities and making decisions she wouldn’t make. She’s also not in their shoes nor in their minds so she tries not to judge.

Home was her old room in her parents’ house, the high bed with the sturdy mattress and the nest of blankets she had made under it, the shelves filled with books who had been more her guidance over the years than her own parents.

Looking at a being made of metal from outer space, she wonders if they had a home too. Not just a house, not just a roof over their heads and a place to sleep, but a _home_. Somewhere they felt safe.

She daydreams about a world made of metal, of other beings just like the one in front of her, but she stops herself before she goes too far. She doesn’t want to force her society’s rules on an alien race, one she knows nothing about no less. Maybe they don’t have governments, or families, or tea and biscuits and getting wasted. She doesn’t want to assume, so she doesn’t. She will learn or remain wanting.

The sun had risen some more, and she’s starting to feel the heat. She’s not sweating yet, her battered tank top and a faint breeze keeping her dry, but she’s warm, and she knows that in one hour tops she will have to go or risk some serious sunburns.

The being had shifted, looking at his feet curiously before raising one. From where she sits she can see the metal has gotten dusty, dirt clinging to the bottom of the mechanisms and having gotten through the cracks and lines between plates. With what sounds like a huff, they shake their legs, but only a few pieces of soil fall down.

Their face contorts in a scowl of what she thinks is disgust, and the expression is so familiar and startling that she almost laughs, hand slapping against her mouth to cover the strange gurgle of her throat. This attracts the other’s attention, who stares at her with narrowed blue eyes, scowl still firmly in place.  

She can’t help but feel awed by the being’s attention on her, the thought of someone so majestic just… wasting time to look at someone so insignificant is mind-blowing.

She knows her self-esteem is not good at all, instead of being through the roof like the assholes she seems to be surrounded with it’s down through the floor, probably somewhere near the inner core of the planet. She’s always degrading herself, not thinking about her nonexistent self-worth, but she never thought of other people as ‘better’ than her, it’s not about that. She just doesn’t see much value in herself, that’s all. She’s flesh, and blood, and tissues. A bag of bones.

But this day, right now, looking at this metal being coming from the stars, taller and stronger than her in ways she hasn’t known until now, she feels like a speck of dust in a field.

Insignificant.

Boring.

They could… step on her, make her become a smear on the soil, red mingling in the brown to become mud, and probably not care. Nobody would care, in front of this magnificence.

She’s powerless, control taken from her, and she realizes she should be terrified. Judging by the fears she has felt all her lives, the terror of death and pain and the unstoppable force of time, she ought to feel this new revelation as maddening, heart-wrenching, maybe making her tear her hair out of her skull while her brain is swamped by hysteria.

But she’s not.

She’s really not, because no matter what happens, something bigger than her is moving events around her. Her fate is not based on what she does, is subjugated by the whims of this being she doesn’t know anything about, by their volatile desires, if they have any.

She could die now, for laughing, or die in ten minutes, for _not_ laughing.

It doesn’t matter what she does right now.

Therefore she raises her face, still under the close scrutiny of those blue _blue_ eyes, and smiles, lips stretching in an unfamiliar motion that hurts her cheek, but she’s careful, _careful_ , not to show her teeth.

Despite the powerlessness she feels in the shadow of this _alien_ , she’s not resentful, she doesn’t hate them.

She’s awed.

Such magnificent machinery, glinting in the sun, and they’re staring at her.

They probably have different social behavior and etiquettes – again, she doesn’t know if they even have a _society_ , or manners – than hers, but the lizard brain inside her head doesn’t want her to show her teeth.

Teeth are aggression, violence, a threat hinted between soft skin and moist membrane.

She’s not a threat. Not only because she’s not capable of even remotely being one, but because she doesn’t _want_ to.

Therefore she smiles, and she feels sweetness and warmth blossom in her chest, her eyes curving and feeling almost wet.

She smiles, feeling nothing but good-will and desire to help towards this being so different from her, and watches as the other’s eyes seem to get brighter, face curving in what she thinks is surprise, and great legs move, making them take a step back, back of their heel meeting suddenly the edge of the crater, the impact making the being startle almost comically and list backward.

Her eyes widen in her face as she witnesses the alien almost lose their balance, arms jerking outward and almost grab frantically at the air as the gigantic body trembles and starts to fall backward, big hips already curving in a move that her brain suggests would help absorb the impact before something inside all that metal catches up, whirrs and shifting sounds reaching her ears.

The being rights themselves, a few curls of steam leaving lateral slits in their thighs, and the sheer _surprise_ written across that elegant face is more than she can take, the strangeness of her morning and the sequence of events catching up to her, loosening the control she has on her body.

And this time, there’s no hand to muffle her as she laughs, openly and amused, remembering the feeling of her clumsy body falling again and again all through her youth, when the frequent growth spurts hadn’t given her the chance to adapt to her new longer limbs and bruises blossomed almost without her notice.

She understands the disorientation, the embarrassment of being caught falling, the few moments in between when she tries frantically to stop her descent, and she laughs kindly, without scorn, without reproach, at seeing such behavior mirrored by an alien of all beings.

And the being probably understands, maybe feels her kind amusement, because they don’t get angry, don’t avoid her eyes, don’t turn their back. With growing fascination, she can see the twitch in those metal lips, one edge turning upwards, and her chest seems to explode as she witnesses such beauty _smile_.

 

 


	3. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings to be found in the beginning notes of the first chapter.

3.

She can’t help but feel some kind of barrier has fallen. The being seems much more relaxed, looking quietly at the rising sun, seeming to admire the shades of blue in the sky, the fluffy clouds flitting around, startling comically at the first bird that flew too close to them, almost smacking them in the face with a wing.

She’s almost ready to go – regret making acid burn in her empty stomach, the thought of never seeing this magnificent being ever again maddening – when the alien suddenly looks down at themselves, a high-pitched screech leaving their throat. Under her wide eyes, liquid metal seems to seep from places she can’t see with her weak eyes, the blobs all over their bodies covering sensitive internals and wires and almost everything, and she can see it _solidifying_ in place, the wet sheen hardening and getting tougher until all that’s left are plates of… of _armor_ , covering the being chest, arms, thighs and legs, even their feet, and she’s sure all their back is covered too.

The last blob travels upward, slithering up their neck to encompass their head, leaving their face and part of the throat free, before too it hardens in something almost resembling a helmet, closely circling the vents she has seen before next to the being’s cheeks and forming a crest at the top of their head.

She can almost believe that nothing else more awe-inspiring will happen, but then the _colors_ start to appear. They bleed in existence all over the hardened plates, sky blue – and she notices how it resembles the prettiest shade of the sky above them, it’s almost the same – covering all the external plates over shoulders, arms and thighs, covering hands and feet and settling like a splash of color on the being’s pelvic span, while white follows after, covering all the rest, the chest and abdomen and lower legs, the forearms. A spot of red, the last color to appear, catches her attention, a flash of bright in the sea of white over the alien’s wide chest. The blob is almost square, definition settling in as it morphs and shrinks in places until all that’s left is… a _face_.

A distinctly alien one, at that, and one she has never seen before, obviously.

The now blue-and-white being is looking down at themselves, a strange rumbling sound coming from them that she can’t help but translate as approval, and they’re flexing the armor in ways she has never seen possible, single plates lifting apparently on their own volition, angling in different ways, _rotating_ at some point, and from the gaps between them she can see that the wires and machinery from before have also been covered by what looks like another layer, from the distance seemingly thin and light gray.

As the alien continues their inspection, she looks upward, and the sun blinds her. It’s too high, too hot, she’s terribly late and her skin is already burning, she can feel the tightness settling in.

She has to leave.

As she climbs down her pile of dirt, absently shaking loose soil from her sweatpants, she feels disappointment crawl and settle on her chest, in her throat, tasting foul on her tongue.

At least, she tries to console herself, she has witnessed the amazing display with the liquid metal and the colors. She wants to say she will never forget it, but human memory is fallible. But she will treasure the memory for as long as she can.

After a few steps, she turns her head. The being is still inspecting themselves and doesn’t seem to have noticed her departure. Or maybe they just don’t care.

She thinks about waving, calling out to them, saying goodbye in some ways, but her chest compresses on itself, anxiety rearing its ugly head.

Why should she distract them from their activity? To have the confirmation of their indifference would feel ten times _worse_ than what uncertainty she feels now, and like always, she doesn’t try, doesn’t take the chance, doesn’t expose herself to possible hurt.

She’s always lived on the razor’s edge, going back and forth between _too much_ and _not enough_ , emotions tearing her apart until she wanted to _die_ and letting her go numb when the bad moment passed.

If she can help it, she will avoid a bad day. She knows they’re right around the corner, she can feel their threatening tendrils trying to wrap around her, to drag her down even when she’s numb, even when it’s an okay day, and their future happenings is one of the only things she knows for sure.

If she can delay even one of them, it’s a win in her books.

Therefore, with longing tearing a hole in her chest, she takes a last look at the creature, bright in the sun, admiring the gentle edges and the richness of the colors, the elegance of those limbs and that important chin and the straight nose and those _blue_ eyes, and she walks away, every step an agony, her mind screaming at her to _turn back_ , right now, because something like this only happens once, if ever at all.

She won’t have another opportunity.

She doesn’t know what could happen, but it could be _glorious_.

But she’s always known she was weak. Too much heartbreak, too many broken dreams, broken expectations, too many times of being dragged down in the mud and held down until she had learnt her lesson, until she doesn’t even _want_ to try anymore.

She knows her failings, and she’s helpless to them.

Weak.

There’s nothing she can do to better herself.

She keeps walking.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's short, and the next two chapter at least, if I remember correctly, are gonna be even shorter.   
> It just felt right to end them where they did.


	4. 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First chapter's warnings apply.   
> Seriously, go read them carefully if there's something in this world that triggers you.   
> There's not 'being too careful' with these kind of things.

 

 

 

 

4.

 

 

 

She must have walked for half a minute, she doesn’t know how long the distance is – she’s so _bad_ at getting approximate dimensions – when there’s a strange sound behind her.

It’s high-pitched but not shrill, doesn’t hurt her ear, it travels the distance easily and makes her feel like it is directly spoken beside her. It’s a throaty chirp, a rumble, a vibrating noise that sounds so strangely _questioning_ that, despite her resolve, makes her turn her head, to understand what might have caused it – because she already knows its origin, of course, this is a noise she has never heard in her life, and there’s an alien behind her, and she can do 1 + 1, thank you very much.

The being is staring right at her, a strange expression on their face, a long-fingered hand extended towards her, as if to stop her, pull her back, make her stay.

Maybe it’s her wishful thinking speaking right now.

As soon as they notice her watching their arm they drop it quickly, stand shifting and leaning back from where it had moved forward, and those blue optics leave her body, head turning sideways and looking in the distance.

She frowns, not understanding. Maybe it was not her they had been trying to call?

Looking at them for another long second, noticing the shifting as they moved their weight a bit from one foot to the other, she waits for another sign, but nothing comes.

Maybe it’s her mind playing tricks on her. Her lips curls as she turns her back, starting to walk away again. How disgusting, how needy she is, that her own brain tries to trick her into believing someone would call out for her. Someone who doesn’t need her.

She can’t do anything for the alien.

She stops right in her track as the sound reaches her again. It’s louder this time, more _demanding_ , steadier when before it had felt tremulous and uncertain. She can’t help but compare the two instances in her mind as she turns again, uncertainly attributing the first sound to instinct, something escaped by accident, and the second sound to intent, something deliberate.

It seems to be like this, because the being is staring determinately at her, curled fists at their sides, the alien apparently steeling themselves, thin and delicate nostrils flaring and expelling what must be something resembling a breath before they move, slender legs rising one at a time, taking them out of the crater.

They seem taller somehow, and as they walk towards her they get bigger, the distance she has walked closed in two simple strides, the ground shaking a bit under her feet under their weight. At a safe distance, they stop, slowly bending their knees to lower themselves closer to her height, even though they still tower over her. She blinks, gets a little closer, but not by much, at arm distance from their closest knee.

She could touch, comes the sudden thought. She’s already dared to touch the… the _egg_ , and nothing happened to her, and she could touch them again. But now she _knows_ they’re alive, a being with their own mind and probably boundaries, and she would never assume she’s allowed to touch them.

Never.

Even if looking at that smooth sky-blue and white armor makes her want to touch so _badly_ , to see if it is smooth as it seems.

The being makes that sound again, lower and so _deep_ it vibrates through her chest, shaking her bones.

She can’t understand them, of course. She looks up at them and shrugs her shoulders, hoping her movement and the expression on her face helps convey how sorry she is that she can’t answer them, if what they said was even a question.

They must have understood, because their face twists in what she thinks is _frustration_ and… _something_ brushes against her, something she can’t see, something that feels tangible but isn’t, because nothing is in front of her, nothing is slithering over her arms and slowly encompassing her.

The hair on her arms rises, and she compares it to accidentally stepping through a spiderweb, or even better, a single string of web of a lonely spider that has been unfortunate enough to dangle where she’s going to walk. She can’t _see_ it, but she feels it.

This strange feeling surrounds her, strangely warm in a comforting way, and… yep, _frustration_.

She’s fascinated, and her wide eyes must have warned the being of her feeling… whatever they did, because the feeling flashes brightly like _surprise_ and then retreats and disappears, their head tilting a bit as their optics narrow, looking at her. She feels the loss keenly, like an intangible blanket around her soul being taken away, and she wants to ask them to give it back, whatever it was.

She looks up at them, knowing now that they are feeling _frustrated_ , and she ponders that that must have been a way of their species to interact with one another, to get a feeling of each other’s emotions.

She’s charmed, and then a little worried, because it must be… _intimate_. It had felt that way, at least, a touch down to her soul, going through skin, flesh and bones like they were nothing. Maybe it’s different for them, but somehow she doesn’t think so.

She searches their eyes, anxious that she _offended_ them somehow, despite not being her fault, despite not knowing – ignorance is not an excuse, a little voice whispers in her mind – and not having anticipated the contact, but they seem just surprised, not angry.

Suddenly she wonders if they had felt her emotions and keenly as she had felt theirs, if her awe and longing and that strange tenderness deep in her chest have managed to be transmitted to them.

She ought to feel ashamed, or bashful. She doesn’t.

The being makes that sound again, without even opening their mouth, deep in their chest, and she wishes she could be able to understand them.

But she can’t, and she just shakes her head, pressing her lips together and trying to convey how sorry she is, and despite knowing it’s not _her fault_ she berates herself, traitorous voice in her head reminding her how worthless she is, how she can’t do anything right, she can’t help this magnificent being in front of her.

Her rational side protests, as it always does, that nobody would be able to do better, because it’s alien, because it’s not even words, how could she expect herself to _reply_ to it. It’s a sound, one she can’t make, because she knows her vocal cords are not built right, that if she tries she’d only hurt herself, like she remembers happening when she was younger, when she had tried imitating animal sounds.

She can remember the burn deep in her throat, the raspy quality her voice had gained for almost a week.

She _knows_ she’s not to blame, but she’s a slave to the voice, she’s a slave to _herself_ and her emotions and her deep-sated issues that always bring her down. Always.

The sun is beating down on her and she’s sweating now, neck literally dripping in moisture, and she has to go home. She has to. Temperatures are climbing and it’s dangerous to be outside in this heat, especially right under the beating sun like she is.

A hand crashes down in the ground behind her just as she’s almost turned to leave, the being making that sound _again_ , limb as a physical barrier to prevent her from leaving.

Why? Why?

She doesn’t know, but she has to speak up, make them understand.

She chooses English, because it’s more international than Italian, easier a language for the being to learn if they want instead of her tricky first language, and when she would normally be self-conscious about her pronunciation – learning a language from books is great for grammar and actually writing the words, but _saying_ them always left her stumped – she’s just hopeful they would somehow understand, somehow get the meaning behind faltering words.

“I can’t help you” she says, and _hates_ how thick her accent is, how she stumbles over the vocals and how _unclear_ her speech is even to her own ears.

The being turns their head sideways, still looking at her, their eyes brightening to an even more clear blue she thinks is possible. Something starts making a little whirring sound.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t” she says again, stepping carefully over their hand, making sure she doesn’t touch them, putting her feet in between the gaps of those slender fingers. “I have to go.”

Clearing the barrier, she nods her head in farewell, her eyes flitting over their frustrated expression, and starts to walk away for what feels like the countless time that day.

A minute later, just as she’s almost sure they’re going to let her go, steps shake the ground and approach from behind, the being entering her visual field from the corner of her eyes as they walk beside her, comically slowly, every one of their steps counting more than five of hers.

They’re following her.

Her stomach tightens as she imagines her reaching town with the being beside her. People being able to see them even from a distance.

She knows what would happen. She _knows_ , and the fear that sweeps over her is so sudden and strong she almost trips on her feet.

She’s scared, but not for herself, but for them, because she _knows_ what her own race would do, what it would attempt to gain from something so foreign and clearly more advanced than humanity had ever even tried to be, even dreamed to be, and even if she’s sure the being is able to protect themselves she still knows it wouldn’t end well.

There are so many of human, and only one of them. She doesn’t want this to happen. It scares her so deeply her eyes start to water, sight blurring in front of her, and she stops walking, looking up at their eyes.

The sight of her upset must have startled them, because they take a brief step back, blue eyes widening, before leaning forward towards her, and the same slithering sensation from before begins again, and the _worry_ she feels on her skin and deep in her soul coming from them makes her cry for real, tears overflowing from her eyelids and dribbling down, heavy on her cheeks and blending with the sweat there.

“You can’t follow me” she says, and her voice trembles and shakes, probably making her already difficult to understand words even more unintelligible. Frustration is brief, swamped by the fear and terror again, and maybe she could use this strange contact thing, maybe as she theorized it’s two-ways and she could make them _feel_ the reason why they can’t follow her. Therefore she presses everything she feels against the sensation, the upset, the terror, the fear, the uncertainty and that strange feeling of protection she had started to feel the moment she had laid her eyes on the egg, even before she knew it was a being, a mind. She hopes they understand, she watches as they reel back, blue eyes wide and bright, mouth slipping open as if they were going to talk, as if to ask _why_ , and she can’t handle this no more.

The emotions are swamping her in a way she knows intimately well, in a way she knows she can’t handle out in the open, where she can’t lay down on the ground and curl in a ball, where she can’t claw at her chest and scream silently and cry and hope it will pass soon. She can’t handle all of this here, and more than anyone else, she doesn’t want the being to see her while she falls to pieces.

“It’s dangerous for you” she forces out, thin arms cradling her own body in a hug that is more to hold her tearing chest together for a little more than to actually comfort herself. “You can’t follow me, you have to _hide_.”

She barely waits for her words to be heard before she turns and runs, runs like the devil is at her heels, runs and prays whatever imaginary deity is listening to reach home before she shatters, runs and prays more than ever that the being got her message, understood what she’s fearful of, of her warmongering race and bloodthirsty humans that would stop at nothing to have a piece of them.

She runs and hopes and runs some more, her heart and chest and mind tearing themselves apart in her own arms as the assault on her being begins once more.

 

 

 

 


	5. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It feels to me like thousands of years have passed since I last published something on Ao3.  
> The ones of you who follow my other story know that a lot of things happened in the last month or so, and I've been very busy.   
> This chapter is the last one of the pre-written ones, and I don't know when the next one is going to pop up in here.   
> Like I said in the first chapters and the tags, this is a practice story, and as such is not a priority like Further to Fall, but I'll try to not make you wait too much.   
> Let me know what you think!

 

 

5.

 

 

The day passes in blurs and flashes, the sun burning her eyes every time she shifts and moves and looks at the window from her curled position on the floor.

She remembers collapsing halfway home, her body shaking and jerking in an alley out of the way of the main street as emotions tore her open, clawing at her sanity. She had been unable to stand up, to continue the journey home, and had had to wait in the dirt and piss and garbage until she reached a numb moment, when the storm momentarily abated and all she felt was the coldness and nothingness of emotional death.

She had gathered herself up, with shaking muscles and clenched fingers and bloody fingertips from where she had clawed at her sides under the flimsy shirt, and run the rest of the way, run on shaky and half-paralyzed legs and smelling of filth and trying to skirt around the crowd in the streets, gathering disgusted looks but not caring, not caring when all she could feel was numbness and all she could wish was for everything to stop.

She’s dangerous, when she’s like this, she knows, not for others, but for herself. Because the wish for the void screams from every particle of her being, the yearning for this hell on earth, for this pain that’s always coming, always around the corner, something she can’t escape from, to stop so strong she’s grateful for her fear of death, and physical pain.

She wants it, so much that it hurts, so much that it’s all she can think of when these bad days happen, but her fear, like always, is stronger.

What lays after death? After decay, after synapsis stop working and blood stops pumping? The _fear_ of the unknown, as maddening as it is in its own right, is the only thing that keeps her alive.

And she quakes, she cries, she trembles at the thought that one day will come when the pain will overcome her fear, and she won’t be able to hold herself back. When her mind is clear, and she can think without feeling like blades sinking in her gray matter, she knows she doesn’t want to die. She knows she could overcome this, could get better, get help.

She knows all this, and yet…

Yet, when the pain is strong and sharp and everything she can focus on, everything slips away, every desire she has, everything she could do, possibilities at her fingertips, potential ideas blossoming like flowers under her care, everything falls back until all she can think of is _please make it stop_.

She had made it home in time for another surge to hit her like a harpoon through the chest, and she hadn’t been able to take a shower like she had planned, to remove the stink of the alleyway before crashing on the bed.

She had settled for the floor, and had been there ever since, curled haphazardly in a ball like the sheer physical pressure would keep her together. She waited it out.

Because it would end. It always did.

She always hopes she will be alive when the end comes.

Next thing she’s aware of is the sunset’s light coming from the window, shrouding her and the room in shades of orange and red, like she was surrounded by splattered blood and the remains of a slaughter.

Somehow, it is exactly how it feels.

The aftermath.

The aftermath is always quiet. She gathers herself up, feeling her joints pop and protest, the ache in her muscles and deep inside, in places that shouldn’t be able to ache but do. She makes sure she doesn’t touch anything other than her already dirty clothes with her bloody fingers, reaches the bathroom and takes a long shower.

She’s numb.

Numb and tired, and while under the water that always feels painful against her skin she can feel her stomach shrunk to a black hole, any hunger she might have felt for more than a day without food disappeared into nothingness, like her heart, like her emotions, like her thoughts.

She doesn’t think.

The aftermath comes with an autopilot, a combo of muscle memories that make sure she cleans herself up, gathers a few bottles of water on the nightstand, and goes into bed. Normally she’s also able to put on some pjs, but even as distantly as everything feels she detects the heat of summer pressing against her skin, and she goes without.

She doesn’t feel the whisper sensation of a sheet over her backside and lower back, she doesn’t care about her nudity, she just settles on her stomach and closes her eyes, falling in the black hole.

 

 

 

The next couple of days feel more like a movie, something she’s watching from behind a screen, than her real life. She’s detached – _dissociating_ , her brain reminds her – and even the usual boredom of her work can’t seem to reach her. She considers it a win as she keeps scanning items at the check-out line, automatic smile on her face, the usually minimal effort of being polite and keeping a pleasant enough façade now weighing on her shoulders.

She just watches her work hours go by, hands moving on autopilot, lips moving over practiced lines, and dreads the moment she will have to return home, hours spent in the darkness looking outside of the window, her usual books no longer pleasant to her numb mind.

By the third day, she feels a spark of irritation and anger in her chest as a customer makes her scan every item _twice_ , and right when they need to pay they decide they don’t actually need all those things anymore. She wants to scream her throat out, throw things, rise from her chair and just quit and go somewhere. She doesn’t, she needs the money, but just the _spike_ of emotion inside her, the rush of chemicals in her brain as they seem to wake from their hibernation, feels like being born again.

She knows her funk will end soon. Everything will go back to how it was before, not necessarily good, but enough.

She manages not to do something that would get her fired, and as she closes up the shop she walks with a skip in her steps. Public transport in a pain in the ass, as always, but at least at that late hour there are not a lot of people, she can breathe freely without feeling like someone’s sweaty armpit has been shoved under her nostrils.

Just down the street from her apartment a car catches her eyes, the lamppost light shining over dusty and slightly-dented light-blue plating. She blinks, approaching slowly. It’s a perfectly normal car, a low-to-medium ranged economic car, nothing special to look at. It has just caught her attention because despite not being close to her neighbors and not knowing their names she distantly recognizes their faces, especially the cars they drive, and this one… this one is new.

She hasn’t heard of anyone new moving in.

The car is silent and dark, the windows fully closed and strangely tinted, and it seems, it feels to her like it hasn’t moved for a few days.

How she hasn’t noticed it, she doesn’t know.

She’s about to walk away, back home, when she noticed something in the hood.

It’s a red face, strangely placed where the car company logo should have been.

As soon as she recognized it something invisible slithers over her hand, just curling around it and her wrist, making the hair on her arm raise as a feeling of quiet _greeting_ reaches her from the strange tingling sensation.

She blinks once more, mouth parting lightly, and takes an instinctual step closer, the warmth she had felt days before out in the field curling in behind her sternum despite the numbness still residing there, and her ‘free’ hand twitches before she remembers herself, the urge to touch smothered before it could offend the being in front of her.

Who is a car.

A closer look reveals that despite the dust and dirt and dents the vehicle doesn’t sport even a scratch, it’s just _pristine_ under what she realizes must be a way to fit in in her poor neighborhood, a way to let gazes slide past, nothing to see but a dusty and dented car.

The feeling around her wrist curls a little bit tighter, _satisfaction_ and light _amusement_ reaching her, and she remembers that this mysterious thing must allow the alien to read her emotions. They must have felt her reach her conclusion, then.

She almost smiles. Almost.

Regret has a second to rise in her before being smothered again by the blankness, but the being must have felt it, because the being _squeezes_ her hand with the invisible tendril and transmits _understanding_ and _patience_ before releasing her, the skin around her wrist and hand feeling strangely cold all of a sudden.

She moves away, towards her apartment, leaving the car behind her, because she’s not ready yet. She’s not ready to decide anything, to _do_ anything important, because she’s not herself right now. She’s still just a shell, a hollowed-out husk, and she needs to fill her chest again, to bring forth that part of her hidden and shoved deep inside, before meeting the being properly again.

They will wait.

She climbs the stairs, unlocks her door, forces her stomach to behave and eat something. She puts on a movie, managing to feel a few flickers of amusement in her throat, and despite the melancholy closing her windpipe and making her gasp for air as she tries to sleep later that night, it’s progress.

She will not make them wait much longer.

 

 

 

 


End file.
